Experimental writing and artists books

September 9, 2008 to accompany the special issue of The Journal of Artists Books

Most writers compose a text, not a book, but those who conceive their literary forms
within the constraints of graphical and spatial formats, though rare and unique, are
notable. At the very outset of the modern era, William Blake embodies the model of book
artist poet, one for whom the presentation and composition are inextricably bound in a
single complex whole. Page and sequence, part to whole and frame to margin, border and
image, writing and interlineal motifs all figure in Blakes book works. Few independent
artists or writers involved in book design have the stature of the Blake, but in the two
centuries since the visionary poet exercised his artistic imagination, others have
combined the traditions of literary experiment and innovation in the book format.
Among them, many of the modern writers who wrote books rather than texts
were well acquainted with the print shop and its techniquesWalt Whitman, William
Morris, and William Butler Yeats, or the American humorist Gelett Burgess. Fine press
traditions in which book format integrated with literary composition, such as the Vale
Press, Chiswick Press, or Cuala Press, might be considered happy syntheses of graphic
and illustrational sensibilities with literary ones so that the final product is a whole
conception even if the textual composition occurred independently. Oscar Wilde wrote
for the stage as much as the page, but the edition of The Sphinx designed by Ricketts
might be the best performance of that work ever done, just as Aubrey Beardsleys
rendering of Salom in the English edition published for the first time in 1894 stamped
the work with a definitive character. The charge might be made that this is not an artists
book, conceived from the outset as a work produced in the codex form as an integral
whole. But other examples that do meet such criteria can be readily brought into view.
Nineteenth century instances of book work as a whole took inspiration in part
from Richard Wagners concept of the gesamtkunstwerk. Even the brilliantly iconoclastic
utopian aesthete Stphane Mallarm was touched by the composers vision in his own
extensive vision of the book as a spiritual instrument capable of working dramatic
social change while also embodying a radical (in all senses) aesthetic through its material
and graphical realization. A Throw of the Dice, like the work of Mallarms
contemporary, William Morris, spun off a host of writer-book-artist imitative or inspired
spawn in subsequent decades. The Roycroft industry, brain child of the entrepreneurial
self-made evangelist, Elbert Hubbard, put arts and crafts inspired bibles into the hands of
American householders. With customary hubris, Hubbard extended his argument for the
codex as an aesthetic work into designs for his own writings. In a dramatically different
vein, artists and literary figures like the aforementioned Gelett Burgess, conceived of
projects like The Lark published in San Francisco between 1895 and 1896, or his
delightful Le Petit Journal des Refuses. Their imaginative engagement with the full
design of the book format demonstrated they had absorbed the lessons of Kelmscott,
other exemplars of the fine press movement, and even the beginnings of the impulse that
would develop into livres dartistes.
By the early 20
th
century, avant-gade poets and writers in Russia ,Germany, Italy,
France, England and other parts of Europe, theorized the book as an artistic agent of
social change. The commitment of Lazar El Lissitzky, Velimir Khlebnikov, Natalia
Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Wassily Kamensky, and Ilia Zdanevich and other
members of in the Russian Futurist movement created a host of major literary works in
innovative book formats. Filippo Marinetti and his lieutenants, Ardengo Soffici and
Fortunato Depero, made fully designed literary works whose page sequences were
conceived from the outset as part of the textual field. If Dada and Surrealist artists were
less involved with books than film, performance, and painting, the single example of Max
Ernst as a major figure of book art (to suggest that these graphic novels are not literary
would be absurd) is sufficient to argue for the codex as a medium of aesthetic innovation.
At mid-20th-century, the Situationist Guy DeBord worked with CoBrA artist
Asger Jorn on the remarkable 1959 production of Mmoires, while the founding Lettrist,
Isidore Isou, produced a graphic comic novel about flirtation, as well as a conceptual
work in the book format in the form of debris and detritus. In the same early 1950s era,
fellow Lettrists, Maurice Lematre and Gabriel Pommerand, each created remarkable
individual works of hypergraphic book work, such as the latters St. Ghetto des Prts.
Decisions about what counts as literary work in the book format and what falls
more properly into either conceptual art, pop, or fluxus muddies easy boundaries among
genres. But 0 to 9 and the literary productions of Carl Andre, or typewriter works by
Bernard Heidsieck, Henri Chopin, or the intricately designed work of Dick Higgins in his
intermedia productions of Something Else Press all contribute to radical textual
innovation as well as visual and graphic art. If we cannot imagine the early 20
th
century
without the contributions of Marcel Duchamp (including the Green Box and his
conceptual writings), then neither can we imagine the later 20
th
century without the
writings, compositions, graphical/musical/textual performances of John Cage, with their
influence on Jackson MacLow whose sensitivity to page, if not book, is obvious in all his
works. Genre bending abounds in this era, and the conceptual and procedural turns in
experimental writing are intimately linked with visual arts counterparts. Whether Tom
Phillips and Walter Hamady find their place in a literary canon, or whether Madeline
Ginss brilliant 1969 Word Rain is read alongside the essays of Robert Smithson or in a
course on experimental womens literature, with Hannah Wiener, Susan Howe, or
myself, all graphically inclined writers intent on shaping book space as writing space,
matters less than that the traditions of experiment these embody are known for their own
unique contributions to the understanding of literary experiment in the book format.
My list could be much longer with specific examples of individual works by Bern
Porter, Ken Cambell, Ruth Laxson, b.p. Nichol, Charles Bernstein, John Crombie, Steve
McCaffery, and other cross-disciplinary figures whose projects integrate visual and
verbal expression in the space of the codex. Closer to the present, such intentionally self-
conscious writers as Christian Bk, Darren Wershler-Henry, Craig Dworkin, and Emily
McVarish actively engage the book as a primary feature of composition, structuring their
work visually and spatially as well as textually. The legacy of Blake, Morris, Mallarm,
Lissitzky, Cage are all variously present in the conceptual underpinnings of these
projects, as are the many vernacular and industrial productions that provide a language of
graphic writing up to our times. The possibility certainly exists that having the means of
production readily available to more writers will bring about an increase of experimental
work in the book format, however defined. Appreciation of the remarkably rich history of
imaginative innovations will foster such visionary design. This exhibit, and the issue of
JAB that accompanies it, are important invitations to future study and creative work.